68kMLA Classic Interface

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A complete Apple IIc for free!
Posted by: quantumii on 2010-07-28 03:48:20
During my semi-weekly walk around the area to check out the e-waste rooms at the nearby uni, I found a complete Apple IIc.

It has the monitor, extra floppy drive, home-made serial-to-paralell box and the composite cable and the power supply. It came with 2 floppies, "AppleWorks" and a second one probably used for data storage. There also was a printer there, but it was inkjet by the looks of it, and not something I'd want anyway.

It is 110v, therefore I have not powered it on yet (I need to get home where my 110v supply are)

It's dirty, and also shows some yellowing. It sure was fun carrying all this back to work 😉

apple2c.jpg
Posted by: LCGuy on 2010-07-28 07:39:13
Damn...some people are getting some sweet scores lately! :O The best thing I've picked up lately was a Sempron 3000...but that pales compared to a IIc with the 9" display and external FDD...good luck, hope it works 🙂

Posted by: Paralel on 2010-07-28 11:52:17
Interesting, I've never seen an Apple monitor that looked like that.
Posted by: quantumii on 2010-07-28 12:42:55
Okay, so I took it home, disassembled the IIc and the monitor and cleaned the casings. It looks much better now.

The monitor works, the IIc does not. No power light. There's a hum in the power supply if I hold it next to my ear, and I am going to grab my multimeter now to measure if it outputs any voltage.

The IIc has some sort of upgrade board which plugs into the CPU and another socket. My guess is that it is a memory upgrade card.

I hope this is a simple issue to fix 🙂 I will google for the IIc power pinout.
Posted by: quantumii on 2010-07-28 13:36:53
Fixed it. The secondary side on the transformer had a loose solder joint where it connected to the power supply DC converter PCB. I repaired the connection, and lo and behold. Whirring and a green light! Now for the reassembly and connecting everything together to see if it outputs anything to the screen 🙂

Those power supplies sure is a real b*tch to open. Very simple design though, that kinda makes up for it. Much better than the evil switchmode supplies of today!
Posted by: quantumii on 2010-07-28 14:30:34
Here it is running. With the appleworks disk, it complains that it cannot load dos. With no disk, it says "Check disk drive".

With the "data" disk, it boots into basic.

Check it out 🙂

apple2c 001.jpg

apple2c 002.jpg

apple2c 003.jpg
Posted by: LCGuy on 2010-07-28 15:17:38
Interesting, I've never seen an Apple monitor that looked like that.
They were sold to go with the Apple IIc, I think they were pretty popular, most IIcs I've seen have one.
Posted by: Dog Cow on 2010-07-29 10:41:20
Interesting, I've never seen an Apple monitor that looked like that.
If you think that's weird, then you should see the LCD that was made for the IIc.
Posted by: Osgeld on 2010-07-29 11:37:03
or what was that aftermarket one that actually gave you a full "page" display
Posted by: LCGuy on 2010-07-29 15:16:44
Nah, far from it:
Posted by: Anonymous Freak on 2010-07-29 15:57:50
Yeah, I have two of those displays, plus one //c+ color display. (The //c+ display doesn't have the nice stand, though, it looks like just a smaller version of Apple's standard "Snow White" displays.)
Posted by: quantumii on 2010-07-29 23:42:55
That LCD sure is cool looking 🙂

How do I get the IIc to boot directly into basic? Now it complains about the disk if there is none in the drive.
Posted by: madmax_2069 on 2010-07-30 04:08:15
press control reset i think
Posted by: Osgeld on 2010-07-30 06:17:14
yea control + reset
Posted by: cjtmacclassic on 2010-07-30 08:59:35
That Proto-Mac is designed very much like a luggable computing device released in 9/20/89....
Posted by: Osgeld on 2010-07-30 10:15:55
where?

the //c with its (optional and detachable) LCD?

yea they do look similar, but so did a lot of apple products during the snow white era
Posted by: quantumii on 2010-07-30 13:54:27
Thanks, I will try it out after my vacation. I will be gone more or less for 3 weeks, so see you all later 🙂

Posted by: sambapati87 on 2010-07-31 07:01:12
I loved my IIc. I need to get it out of storage at my parents...
Posted by: Scott Baret on 2010-07-31 11:12:59
The "luggable" aspect is why the display stand is shaped the way it is. The thought was that the IIc could be taken wherever (keep in mind it connects nicely to a TV set). In fact, when I used to test Apple IIs, I'd plug them into a 27" TV set with the composite port. (I'm not a fan of huge monitors, but there is a certain thrill to using 1984-era Print Shop or programming in BASIC on a 27" display).

To answer LCGuy's post way back at the top of the page, I think the reason we're seeing all these neat scores is because people are downsizing right now. The ones having financial difficulty are looking for extra cash and gutted their closets to find their old Macs from 20 years ago, figuring they can sell them as antiques. Others give them away since they want to clear space, especially since many baby boomers are retiring and moving to smaller places. (Keep in mind that was the generation who would have purchased them new). I will say, though, that the market in general isn't as good as it was ten years ago when all the schools were dumping their 68K Macs, Apple IIs, DOS/Win3.1 boxes, etc--remember how many there used to be on eBay ten years ago?
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